Convergence

with Nature
A Daoist Perspective

David E. Cooper

Orientation

I set aside the book I was reading when, with the sun reddening, the
evening y-past of crows and green parrots began. For ten minutes,
squadrons of birds sped above or through the grove of coconut palms
that separated the Indian Ocean from the terrace of my room in a Sri
Lankan guest house. The book, as it happened, was about wildlife,
crows included. I rather associate Sri Lankan crows with reading books
about nature. Once, a ock of them tore to pieces my copy of Gaston
Bachelards The Poetics of Space, left unguarded on a chair in a hotel
garden. One chapter the birds shredded was called Nests.
The author of the book I was reading until the crows and parrots
returned to their roosts would approve of my putting it down. He
would think it more important to watch the birds than to read about
them. The choice between looking at birds and reading about them
does not sound like a grave one. But a related decision worried me for
some months.The book you are holding discusses how a person might
live in an appropriate relationship to nature; to animals and natural
places, both wild and, like farms and parks, humanised. Now, what if
writing about nature is the last form such a relationship should take?
Maybe I should be engaging with the natural world in a more immediate, more muscular, and less parasitic way?
I havent resolved this question, although some later remarks in
this book bear on it. But I have learnt to ignore it. In this, Ive been
encouraged by reading authors who write good books about nature
and, at the same time, seem to enjoy a good relationship to it.

Chapter 1 OOrientation

Nature writing
Several of those books belong to the genre of nature writing, which
has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Some ne contemporary
authors1 have written books that are worthy heirs to older classics such
as Gilbert Whites The Natural History of Selborne, Rousseaus Reveries of
a Solitary Walker, Wordsworths A Guide through the District of the Lakes,
and Thoreaus Walden. Not all the authors I have in mind would usually be labelled nature writers, but their books also address questions
about how human beings might properly relate to nature. Books, for
example, on food for questions about what and how we eat are, in
part, about this relationship. Eating, as one of these writers puts it, is
our most profound engagement with the natural world.2
Nature writing is different from natural scientic writing, even
when the authors are themselves botanists or zoologists and lace their
books with scientic information and conjecture. For nature writers
also, and essentially, convey their personal experience of wildlife and
natural environments their moods, emotions and fancies. As an early
reviewer of Whites Selborne observed, not only is the understanding
informed, but the imagination is touched.3 To borrow from the title
of a more recent book, the mountains that gure in nature writing are
mountains of the mind4 as much as they are piles of limestone or
granite.
Nature writing is different, too, from an environmentalist literature whose purpose is to enjoin us, with midnight said to be approaching, to save the planet. It is not that all nature writers pass over
environmental issues or eschew occasional calls to collective action.
But the main orientation is a personal one. The concern is with an
individual persons the authors own relationship with animals and
natural places. The focus, therefore, is not the triply impersonal one of
environmental ethicists and activists. That is, it is not on the formulation of general principles that are supposed to apply to everyone. Nor
is it on devising policies for collective, mass action. Nor is it on actions
and attitudes that, in keeping with our pragmatic age, are judged solely
by the effects they have on life in general, on the human condition,
on the environment, on the planet.
People whose orientation is a personal one whose concern is
with self-cultivation get accused of egoism and moral indifference or

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Convergence with Nature

nihilism.This is unfair.That the point of entry5 for ethical reection is

a concern for the good of the self does not mean that the point of exit
is without implications for the enlightened treatment of other people
and living beings.The ancient philosophers of Greece, China and India,
whose initial question was how an individuals life goes well, nearly all
concluded that it does so only when the good of other people is
attended to. If the virtues refer to aspects of character that help a life to
go well, then so these ancients held some of the virtues will be
other-regarding. Compassion, say, or respect. But it certainly doesnt
follow that a relationship to the natural world that involves such otherregarding virtues has to be one of environmental activism or of commitment to universal principles of conduct that environmental ethicists
seek to formulate. The relationship might be less strident, more intimate, less distracted by an ambition of effectiveness.
So, reection on ones personal relationship to nature is not disjoined from ethical reection. The contrast, rather, is with an
entrenched, modern style of moral reason a style that allows little
scope for personal reection, focused as it is on how one should act
or live. I act rightly, the modern story goes, when I do what it would
be benecial for everyone to do. For the ancients and for me, and for
many nature writers this modern style of moral reason is lacking in
realism, in attention to the world and human conduct as they actually
are, instead of to what they might be if only . . .
Heres an illustration. I havent eaten meat since 1979, when I was
given Peter Singers Animal Liberation as a Christmas present. It wasnt
Singers utilitarian arguments against the meat industry so much as his
powerful descriptions of the conditions in factory farms that prevented me, on Boxing Day, from eating the cold turkey and ham. I still
cannot eat meat and I am unmoved by the criticism that it would be
disastrous if everyone were to give up eating meat. No lambs; no
farmyards; no pastoral.
For a start, I have no idea and nor do the critics what a future
world without meat-eaters would be like. Second, I know perfectly
well that relatively few people will give up meat-eating. It would be
frivolous to determine my relationship to animals whether to eat
them or not on the basis of idle speculation about a world quite different from the one I am actually in. And perhaps worse than frivolous.

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11

Maybe impersonal deliberation on how to relate to animals is in itself

to be in a wrong relationship to them, one that prevents their guring
in our experience and emotional life as they should.
The question I address in this book encouraged by the personal
orientation of nature writing is this:
What should my relationship to nature to animals, to plants, to
natural places be like if it is to be an appropriate one and to contribute to the good of my life as a whole?
Each of you, of course, can address a similar question to yourself
and then judge the relevance to it of the remarks I make on mine.

Some modern moods

My question is not asked out of the blue. It has a context.This context
is provided by a number of moods, each of which though ancient in
provenance is voiced in contemporary nature writing.
One mood is a sort of yearning for what has variously been
called convergence, harmony, intimacy, even identication or unity
with nature on the part of human beings. This yearning is typically
accompanied by a sense that a greater convergence or unity between
people and nature once existed. So a second mood is one of nostalgia,
of regret for the passing of an age when people were, it is said, less
estranged from the natural world.
It is human beings themselves or the civilisations they have
developed who are usually held responsible for this estrangement
from nature. Hence, a third mood is one of disillusion, whether bitter
or resigned, with humanity or at least with the course it has taken.
There is a spectrum of moods within this. At one end is the bleak
misanthropy of an author who identied more with peregrine falcons
than with human beings, and who longed . . . to let the human taint
wash away in emptiness and silence, to lose his predatory human
shape and to shun man, that faceless horror of the stony places
with his stink of death.6 At the other, less dark, end of the spectrum
bitterness is directed, not at humanity as such, but at a consumerist,
hedonistic, hyper-technological society deemed responsible both for
the devastation of the natural world and our estrangement from it.
One thing of which modern culture, with its predilections for

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Convergence with Nature

technology, calculation and science, is often accused by nature writers

is the loss of a sense of natures mystery. This accusation implies an
ambiguous attitude towards science, which is at once applauded for its
discoveries about plants, animals and natural processes, but castigated for
its pretension to be telling a complete story. Thoreau believed that we
require natural phenomena to be mysterious and unexplorable,7 a
point taken up by a later American writer who speaks of natural places
as mysteries that cannot be fathomed, biologically and exhorts us,
if we are to acquire any wisdom about nature, to pay attention to
mystery.8 A fourth mood, then, is a feel for natures mystery for its
ineffability that cannot be dispelled by future scientic research.
I sympathise with these moods of yearning, nostalgia, bitterness or
disillusion, and a feeling for mystery. Because I sympathise with them,
my question about the shaping of an appropriate relationship to nature
becomes more vital. For it is a question energised by the thought of a
deep but atrophied convergence with the natural world that is worth
reviving.
I want to justify these sympathies and to render attractive a certain
conception of an appropriate relationship to the natural world. In
doing so, there are different sources on which to draw. Poetry, for
example, with its capacity, in an image or a line or two, to distil a
mood. Disillusion with humanitys relationship to animals, for instance,
which D. H. Lawrence famously recorded after throwing a log at a
viper that was drinking at a trough:
. . . How paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human
education.9
Or theres the ability of a poet to give a fresh presence to an overfamiliar place. Gains Law is an austere, windswept hill in the Cheviots,
close to my home. I hardly noticed it, until I read these spare verses,
describing the place, by the Northumbrian poet Noel Hodgson:
Lumps of sheep
Scouring
Snow-plastered heather.

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13

Their horned heads

Black-splotching
The Whitescape.
Straggled
Whin bushes
Writhing at stabs
Of icy wind.10
I now walk over Gains Law on snowy mornings with a new attention
and a fellow-feeling for the sheep and the bushes.
Direct, sinewy engagement with natural places when kayaking,
backpacking or climbing is another source on which to draw, as are
the gentler reveries of the solitary walker or watcher. Simple, close
observation of little things of wild owers, insects, pebbles can also
evoke and invite a mood of yearning or nostalgia. As may thoughtful
reection on the place of plants, animals, lakes and hills in human culture and the civilised imagination.

Below Gains Law.

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Convergence with Nature

Philosophys roles
As this last remark implies, one source will be philosophy, my own
mtier. Philosophy, though, is not a single source, but a range of traditions, practices and speculations. Several of these bear upon the concerns
of this book upon, especially, the idea of human convergence with
nature.
To begin with, this is an idea that needs support from general
accounts, of the type that philosophy endeavours to provide, of human
beings and their world. For, if certain accounts are correct, then convergence sounds to be unattractive or impossible. Take, for instance,
the view that is forcibly expressed in Matthew Arnolds ironically
titled poem In harmony with nature:
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lies all his hopes of good. [. . .]
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.11
If the worth of human beings consists in cultural achievements made
possible only through battling the processes of nature, then convergence with nature is a step back towards savagery.
Or take the view, popular among many scientists, that the world
of experience of birdsong, tree resin, owers is illusion, a veil
between us and the real world of invisible particles of which only
physicists have an understanding. Who wants to seek for intimacy or
unity with what is, in effect, a phantom? A yearning for convergence
requires, therefore, different philosophies of human beings and the
world from the views just mentioned.
The idea of convergence, moreover, will remain a coarse one
without analysis, of this and of related ideas (unity, identity, intimacy).
This needs to be an analysis, of the kind philosophers try to provide,
that exposes the implications of the idea for practice and perception.
Certainly, there are plenty of questions about these implications that
can be raised. Here are a few:
Is gardening a model of convergence of a fusion between culture
and nature or is it instead an exercise in human dominion over nature?

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15

Is enjoyment of the beauty of animals, trees and lakes an authentic

form of intimacy with nature, or is it symptomatic of an anthropocentric stance towards nature as a resource for sensual titillation?
What of the fear people reasonably have of dangerous places and animals, and their recognition that nature is in part a theatre of cruelty
and horror? Its rough out there and chancy, observes an American
nature writer, gruesome . . . grotesque . . . a universal chomp.12 Is this
a reason for estrangement, for resisting any identication with nature?
Or are fear and horror, as they seem to be for her, ingredients in an
honest communion with nature?
With questions like these multiplying, pious talk of convergence or
oneness with nature must give way to disciplined reection on its
meaning. Such talk will also remain glib in the absence of perspicuous
descriptions of living things and natural phenomena as these gure in
experience. Consider our experience of animals. Our self-perception, remarks a primatologist, is never animal-free.13 Peoples view
of people is partly shaped by a perception of their similarities to and
contrasts with dogs, apes and other creatures.This perception needs to
be made salient if the signicance of animals in our lives is to be
understood. Perspicuous description that exposes the signicance of
experiences in the larger structures of human practice and understanding in our forms of life is the ambition of the philosophical
approach known as phenomenology.14 Here, then, is another philosophical source on which to draw.
Finally, an older conception of philosophy should be recalled. For
the ancient thinkers of Greece and Asia, philosophy was less a body of
knowledge than a practice of self-cultivation or self-transformation, of
right attunement to the world. Philosophy, for them, was orientated in
the rst instance to the Good, not to the True, even if attainment of
the Good turns out to require respect for the True.
This ancient conception contains an important lesson.The proper
response to questions about life including ones about an appropriate
relationship to nature is not a narrowly cognitive one, not a matter
of mouthing a correct answer. For in order for answers to penetrate
to be deeply cultivated, as Buddhists say and thereby to shape ones

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Convergence with Nature

life, the mind must already be appropriately attuned or transformed.

Life, we hear, should be lived in harmony with nature. Certainly
but if the words are not to remain glib, pious and formulaic, they must
be heard by someone suitably attuned; emotionally and physically prepared for the words to penetrate. Philosophy, on the ancient conception, is a precondition for hearing.
It is often said that, for the ancients, philosophy was a way of
life,15 not a corpus of theory and argument. That is right, provided
that a way of life is used with due weight, and not lightly (as when it
is said, for example, that clubbing has become a way of life among
todays youth). A way a path, for instance typically goes somewhere; it has a destination; it leads or guides those who are on it. Staying on it may require self-discipline, balance, tness and intelligence.
The metaphor of a way is a rich one, nowhere more so than in the
Chinese philosophical tradition whose very name employs the metaphor: Daoism, the philosophy of the dao (tao, the Way). Daoism, I want
to show, has resources and an angle of vision suited to addressing the
question about an appropriate relationship to nature.
On the evening following the one by the Indian Ocean that I
described earlier, the crows and parrots again begin their y-past
silhouetted against a reddening sun. But this time, I cant concentrate.
Behind me, in the restaurant, sits and shouts a group of lobster-pink
tourists who have been combining beer and arrack for six hours.They
are oblivious to the sea, the palms, the falling sun and the chattering
squadrons of birds. Theirs, I feel, is not on this evenings evidence, at
least an appropriate relationship to the natural world. I want to
explore how a Daoist perspective helps to secure this impression.